Ghosts

It is a little known and completely unpublicized fact that I own a haunted hotel. Not haunted in the big creepy Shining way instead it is quietly haunted. And I have asked everyone who knows to keep it quiet.

The only evidence for the haunting was the people who saw it and the security cameras that showed it. Nothing major really, just the spoons on the wall swinging back and forth in different directions. It scared my office boy William. For myself I knew long before this that the place was haunted.

William thinks the hotel is haunted by the last owner, a German man who died before his time in Germany of cancer. I don't agree.

I don't know that we have a ghost. A single individual living in the walls, I believe that these exist but it's not how it feels to me. I think more that the hotel has the residual energy of many many people. That energy and matter are, as Einstein proved interchangeable. I think that long after people leave somewhere some of the energy they left there remains behind.

The hotel has been there a long time, many people have come and gone. I think that some of their energy lives on, stuck perhaps in time or space. Some of this energy is good, happy people on vacation, some is not. Somewhere stuck in cement is ever tear I cried there, somewhere in the walls is all the frustrated rage I felt when I moved here. Nestled in the mortar is the loneliness of knowing you are with someone who doesn't love you.

I never felt comfortable in the kitchen of the restaurant. Not when I lived there. I would enter it to cook and always feel that I wasn't alone, that it wasn't a welcoming space. When the hotel is empty it scares me. When it is full it is a fun place but when it is empty the ghosts fill the holes left by the guests. I feel this way about any place that normally has a lot of people, schools after hours terrify me, public buildings on public holidays are places I walk past uneasily.

When I was a child there were two “ghost houses” on our street. They were old houses that had been abandoned and closed up and kids weren't supposed to enter. The first one was knocked down before I was old enough to be dared into doing something so stupid as enter an abandoned house. The second one I only went in once.

In it's day it had been a nice house, a white Victorian similar to the cold unwelcoming house my mother had grown up in. Pretty lattice work on the front, a small porch. My brother and I climbed over the fence through the hole in the wood past the “No Trespassing” sign with his friends. I must have been 10 and Michael 8, old enough to be bullied into doing something you knew was wrong but not old enough to understand the consequences of doing it.

We didn't have to break in the door, it hung on an angle not quite closed and we walked in. As soon as we entered I knew why the house had been abandoned. The floor was wrong. It sloped away from us and down towards the back of the house. We followed it down, through the kitchen, downward to the back door, and through the door we could see the hole the house was slowly falling into, the embankment that was eroding away taking the house with it.

I walked back slowly into the living room I didn't want to go any further. I peeked in the bedrooms to say I had done it but all I wanted to do was leave that house. It felt like the house was screaming around me, like it was a living entity in despair, or perhaps it was just my imagination. Michaels' friends dared us to enter the house with them at night. But there was no amount of peer pressure that would ever make me enter that house again. I exited as rapidly as possible pulling Michael with me and telling myself that the reason I was scared was because the house was unsafe.

I never went into that house again, and neither did Michael. I would see it every day when I walked past it and I would walk faster until I was past the house. When they finally tore it down I was happy but the air of sadness seemed to linger even over the empty lot.

The last house I lived in in LA was like that. I bought the house not because it was beautiful, or nice but because it was cheap and close to my work. It was never a happy house. I thought it was just that I was not happy there but when we moved out and moved next door none of us wanted to go back into the house. It scared us all too much. We had moved out and only the ghosts remained.My daughter whose home it had been her whole life would not re-enter it even though we were only living across the driveway. And when the house was torn down I was glad. But to this day 4 years later the lot is still empty, unbuilt, cursed. There is something living there still, some energy, something that didn't leave when the timbers of the house were crushed and taken away.

I like my house in Costa Rica not because it is a beautiful house but because it feels good. Every time I enter it I feel a warm sense of welcoming. When I am alone in the house I am alone, no-one follows me around and everything is peaceful. My daughter complains about the house all the time about how she wants to leave, how she wants to move to a new house, a nice house like her friends. She bitches that our house is too old, too broken. She wants a new house with a pool and I can't get it for her. I would like to. She underestimates what our house has. She says it is boring. I can only respond that it is a happy house even when she is not happy in it. I wonder if her continuing dislike and my continuing loneliness will wreck our house, fill it with a sense of lonely abandonment and destroy the sense of home I feel within it.

The wet season is coming and again the hotel will be empty. Filled with only the sounds of absence. With the economy the way it is it may be a quiet time. The restaurant as much as they annoy me create noise and the ghosts in the kitchen are quiet in comparison.

Maybe I'm crazy. Perhaps there is no such thing as ghosts. Perhaps there is no residue energy anywhere in the world and it is only me who thinks she can feel such things. However don't tell William there are no ghosts, he may have to show you the video of the dancing spoons and then you may have to believe too.

Why it doesn't always pay to get your car fixed.

About 2 weeks ago I got four new tires for the car.  We'd been on our way to San Jose, hit a pothole at 1am and blown out two tires in the middle of nowhere.  The police had circled for an hour while a helpful Samaritan and my kid's boyfriend drove off looking for somewhere to get a tire fixed at 1am in the morning.  Finally the police knocked on the door of a local repair man and told him to get our tire fixed because it was too dangerous for us to be where we were much longer.  Tire actually wasn't fixable but miracle of miracles the guy could sell us a second hand tire.  You have to realize that my tires are special extra wide sport tires and even most of the tire stores don't carry them so to say we got lucky is an understatement.

The month before I'd gotten work done on the front, putting in new steering rods and some other big metal thing and finally the clanking sound had stopped.  Of course they'd done it wrong the first time and put in the wrong steering rod so you couldn't actually turn a sharp turn but the second time they'd put in one that didn't rub, but the people who had done the work had left the wheel alignment so bad that the steering wheel was at a 90 degree angle when we were driving in a straight line. So getting four new tires didn't seem like a bad idea, and they could fix the wheel alignment while they were at it.

Four night ago after my father telling me that his friend had done a screenwriting course and sold three screenplays I drove out into the night angry.  Pissed off, angry, driving fast while rain fell.  Yet when I went around that last corner I wasn't going that fast, the sensation was different than I'd ever felt.  I've skidded but this was unique.  The car didn't start to leave the road when I touched the brakes, the car was leaving the road, I slammed on the brakes and then I was off the road, in a concrete ditch slammed into a concrete wall. 

The first thing I thought was "why didn't the airbags go off?" And then "Christ my head hurts." I sat there for a bit shaking, then I got out of the car to look. I was sure I'd destroyed the headlights, possibly the radiator.  I looked and everything looked ok.  There was a hissing.  I figured it was probably the radiator or the tire.  I was in the middle of nowhere and I decided to drive home.  There was nothing else for it. If the tire blow out on the road had taught me anything it was that I was not strong enough to change the tire.  So I drove with my eye on the thermostat.  No change.

The car kept swerving all over the road, I guessed it was the tire. What I didn't know was that it was the steering rod.  The new steering rod which has a ball joint in it had separated, the ball had come out of the joint. That's what sent me off the road. 

When I finally surveyed the damage the aluminum wheel had cracked on impact.  The shock absorber had exploded, the new bushings had popped but the new steering rod had not one scratch on it, it had just turned into two parts, and it looks like it did that before I hit the wall.

So we put the old parts back on and the car is running.  Still needs a shock absorber.  And in reality working air bags.  Now I have to wonder if it's worth getting it fixed.

Getting up in my grill

There's something to be said about a good fight. A decent clean fight where you scream and they scream and you get up in each other's grill.... there's something to be said for both parties knowing what the hell getting up in your grill means.  There is something to be said about understanding exactly what the fuck the person yelling at you is saying and there is something to be said about having the ability to talk back to scream words that make sense in the way that fuck you bitch makes sense but have sex you female dog does not.

The problem with living your life in a foreign language is that the comebacks of your youth just don't work. You have to fight not just fair but clean.  And while you are screamed at all you can do is slowly assemble words to reply with, words that are too slow to stop the next barrage, words that are too clumsy to stop the assult.

You actually don't swear at all, you are super polite and in the end are left shaking with frustration.

Then when the person who has been screaming at you tells the police that you are just a gringo and don't have any rights you don't even have a comeback. And when the police officer says that everyone has the same rights under the law you know it's a lie because you have no rights, not even the right to yell FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING BITCH, GO SCREW YOURSELF, ROT IN FUCKING HELL.

Once upon a time

Mary's mother could not live by a budget.  It was not her largest failing but it was one she tried not to let stop her.  She could not live within her means or save but she could work.  She could work very very hard.  So when Mary said "Mom can I have....." Mary's mother always said yes.  She wanted to give her child everything, and in order to do so she just worked harder.

For this reason Mary spent a lot of time alone.

Mary was a magical child, one who could live for days within her own mind.  She knew how hard her mother worked and she didn't ask to be played with or looked after.  She would look after herself, get her own food, entertain herself with her selection of electronics and by drawing.

Mary did not like school, she had no friends.  She did not complain, she just spent her recess and lunchtime in the library reading a book.  Mary's magic made her different from all the other children.  She didn't need them and they knew it, avoiding her the way that sheep will avoid the sheepdog, with a little fear and suspicion.  The other children spoke about Mary more often than they spoke to her.  Mary who had little use for them thought of the other children as an annoyance in her life and school merely as an inconvenience.

One day Mary's mother couldn't work hard enough to send Mary to the school she hated.  There was no other school she could attend, so her mother sent her away to live with her grandparents.  Mary's mother missed her every day.

Why I hate Neil Gaiman, or want to

I had never heard of Neil Gaiman until about 4 years ago. I didn't read comics (I mean I'm not a boy) and although I like SciFi/Fantasy as a genre I'd missed his imput to it. I was surprised when all my friends talked about him as one of their favorite writers, after all I thought I'd never heard of him.

But I had.  I'd grown up listening to stories of my parent lives before my arrival, of their years in England, in the States.  I'd heard all about their good friends David and Shelia Gaymen, David and Shelia had a son older than me, and a daughter who was married to a friend of my dad's. A few years ago David and Shelia were visiting their daughter (who lives 3 minutes walk from my parents house) and they had lunch. I found this out later.  About the same time that I found out that they Gaymens were really the Gaimans and their son was the writer everyone had been talking to me about for years.

So I went online and read his blog.  He was talking about how his house was cracked at the foundation and he would have to tear down part of it and rebuild.  The thing was that very day I'd had an engineer over to my house, my house was cracked at the foundation and I would have to tear it down and rebuild it.  Only difference I didn't have a penny to do it.  So while Neil went to work on fixing up his old historic house I kept living in my rapidly decaying non-historic badly built piece of shit.

Another couple of years went past till I actually picked up a Neil Gaiman book in the guest room of a friends'.  I wanted it to be one of those books, one of those that grabbed me and kept me up reading as fast as I could forgetting that dawn was going to come. I wanted it to be one of those books that dragged me to the end then left me regretting I had finished it. I wanted it to be great. I wanted him to be one of the best writers I'd read, I wanted him to live up to everyone's acclaim.  I read a couple of chapters and put it down, it was another year or so before I finished the book, because I just didn't care.  I tried again, I read another of his books.  Nothing. I felt nothing. I read another. Nothing.  I looked for something to love but it was all pretty ordinary.  Nothing about the plots grabbed me, I didn't care about the male characters, the female characters were thinner than tissue.  I wanted to like his books and I didn't.

I wanted his books to be great.  I wanted to say, well he's so much better than me as a writer. He's fantastic that's why he's famous and I'm not. But I didn't feel it.

Then his commencement speech was all over the internet and I watched it.  And I heard him talk about his life and how he got to be a famous writer. He started as a journalist.  That had been my plan. He'd gone after it despite everything.  And I hated him.  Because I didn't do that. I didn't go on to be a journalist despite that being the plan, because it didn't make enough money and my family needed money. I didn't go after writing despite everything because there was always something more important than myself, my parents, my husband, my kids there was always someone else to put my attention on, always something else more important that my needs, always something else more important than my desires or dreams.

And in the end it was no-one's fault but my own.  And now I'm 42 years old.  I've never cared enough to be truly successful at anything. 

I was sitting watching IronMan 3 with my kids.  It was an ok movie, not the best IronMan but one of the better action films anyway. I'd just sent off another screenplay to a screenplay competition and was waiting to hear back.  Anyway I am sitting in the middle of a movie theatre and all of a sudden while explosion noises are going off all around me I realize.  I realize that I'm not good enough.  I realize that I've never written a script anywhere as good as this third knockoff of an old comic idea.

Three weeks later I get my notification from the screenwriting competition. I am not good enough. I didn't even make it through the first round.  I didn't even make it to the last 1000 entries. I had in the past but not this time. It wasn't that I didn't win, I didn't even get in the top third.

I know that to break in you don't just have to be as good, you have to be great. And I wish I was. I feel like Neil Gaiman and I started on the same life and somewhere I just didn't try hard enough.  I wish I loved his books, I wish I thought he was great, but since I don't I just feel robbed and mad.  I feel like by virtue of being a woman and trying to be everything to everyone I've never put enough energy into being me into becoming great. I feel like somewhere inside there is greatness but I've never reached it, never tried hard enough to get to it.